Xi Niu: In Search of New Routes opens a new chapter for Rhinoceros as the gallery’s first internally conceived and produced exhibition. Curated by Claire Shiying Li, it approaches the Silk Road not as nostalgia or a trade diagram, but as a mobile infrastructure through which materials, technologies, beliefs, knowledge and identities have travelled.
A Silk Road beyond the postcard
Rome is more than the European backdrop to a Chinese story. The layered Velabro district enters the works’ interpretation. Painting, film, installation, material research and collaborative practice unsettle the fiction of separate, pure cultures.
Seven ways through history
Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun have worked together since 2010 on ecology, rural territories and altered landscapes. Hao Liang renews ink painting on silk through technical, literary and cinematic knowledge. Han Mengyun brings painting, film, writing and performance into contact with Eurasian histories and with intimate questions of gender, care and the night.
Xie Fan uses silk, light, frames and oil to move painting towards an optical condition. Xie Nanxing builds ambiguous images from photography, cinema and memory. Zhao Gang, an early participant in China’s avant-garde, examines history and identity as both insider and outsider. Zhou Yilun absorbs and distorts Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic genealogies in an intentionally impure language.
Rhinoceros: the building is part of the exhibition
The building deserves as much time as the exhibition. Conceived by Alda Fendi and transformed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel from 2012 to 2018, Rhinoceros combines residences, exhibition spaces, galleries, cafés and a panoramic restaurant across 3,800 square metres. Nouvel chose strict simplicity, respecting the hierarchy of the historic fabric while keeping its different ages legible.
“Constructing anything in Rome is fraught.” — Jean Nouvel
The result is an objet culturel habitable rather than a neutral museum. Windows, living surfaces and openings onto Rome turn the palazzo into an editing device. It is an apt frame for Xi Niu: the architecture, too, speaks of routes, transformations and layered identities.
Information
Xi Niu: In Search of New Routes runs from 11 September 2026 to 6 January 2027 at Rhinoceros Gallery, Via del Velabro 9, Rome. Check the gallery website for current access details.